Thursday, December 25, 2014

Trapani and Friends at ACG

Sal Trapani and his ghost pencillers come aboard for ACG's final
two years of operation. Bill Ely is his sole ghost there for nine
stories
as of the 1967-dated issues. Ely's regular assignment at DC, Rip
Hunter,
ended in late 1965.

My
impression is that Rocco Mastroserio penciled the first page
of
"The Mirror of Mystery"; Dick Giordano certainly did the remaining three. What do you think?

There were six other Ditko/Trapani stories at ACG after "My
Ancestor—the
Indian Scout," all credited to both artists, so not on these lists of
ghosted ones. I daresay that Richard
Hughes said "Oh, come on!"
to the idea that the readers wouldn't recognize that particular
penciller. (For what it's worth, after ghosting the pencils on Nukla
1 at Dell, Giordano gets a signature along with Trapani's
on #2 and 4, as does Ditko on #4.)

Adventures
into the Unknown

Dec-Jan/67

169

Two
Vials from Vidalia

p: Bill Ely

Jun-Jul/

173

Miss
Hepzibah Takes a Trip

p: Ely

Forbidden Worlds

Nov-Dec/65

132

The
Mirror of Mystery

p: Rocco Mastroserio,
Dick Giordano

Jul/67

144

"Click,
Click," Went the Machine

p: Ely

Gasp!

Mar/67

1

The
Terrible Teen-Agers

p: Ely

Apr-May/

2

Vengeful
Spirit

p: Ely

Jun-Jul/

3

Sorry,
You've Got the Wrong Ghosts

p: Ely

Aug/

4

You've
Got to Relax

p: Ely

Unknown Worlds

Feb/66

45

My
Ancestor—the Old Indian Scout

p: Steve Ditko

Mar/

46

That's
My Partner

p: Giordano

Mar/67

53

The
Haunted Brush

p: Ely

Aug/

57

When
the Gizmo Blew a Gasket

p: Ely

Interestingly enough,
there's an ACG story ghosted
by
rather than for
Sal Trapani. The art on the
other new story in Unknown
Worlds 53 is credited solely to
Bob Jenney, but Trapani is inking Jenney's pencils.
Unknown Worlds

3 comments:

I think you're right about Mastroserio and Giordano on that story. I actually see Giordano inks popping up here and there in a lot of Trapani's work. Take a look at "My Ancestor...the Indian Scout." As I understand it, even though Giordano was an editor at Charlton, he and Trapani were sharing a studio at the time, occasionally with other artists, so a lot of pages were passed back and forth on both their work.

I suspect what happened with that issue with two Ely/Trapani jobs, one credited to each, was that Hughes knew who'd done the work but just plain didn't want two stories in the same issue credited to the same artist(s) so he credited one on each. He was, after all, the guy who hid behind dozens of pen names so the same name would never get a writing credit twice in the same issue.

I wonder if Trapani was acting as a kind of agent for guys like Ely and Jenney who could easily get work on their own at Dell and ACG. Maybe he agented all their work for these guys, even the stuff he didn't ink.

I corresponded with Hughes for a time and need to find those old letters some day. As I recall, he told me that he was not full-time on the ACG comics and would sometimes stop working on them for a month or two at a time to do some other project. As a result, he often had a huge backlog of material and some stories were first published years after they were drawn. So there may have been periods there when he was only actively buying from two or three artists even though a wider range of artists appeared in his books. He told me had "dozens" of unpublished John Force stories and didn't think they'd all ever be printed since sales seemed to go down whenever they ran one. Someone ought to take a look at those since a lot of the GCD credits on them are obviously wrong.

Mark, I can agree to seeing some Giordano inking on the Indian Scout story now that you point it out. I can't cite specific issues, but I have noticed Hughes's reluctance to credit the same artist twice--most often when he'd let Ogden Whitney go uncredited on his second story in an issue.